The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

This study examines heritage speakers' knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language varieties, including Colloquial Arabic (QA), on SA acquisition. To this end, the study…

The prosody of the stanzaic poems called madrasê, written in Syriac by Ephrem of Nisibis in the fourth century, has long been studied by scholars. Until now, these studies have focused on meter, but this has left many questions unanswered. The present study examines the interclausal syntax of individual stanzas of madrasê V and VI of the cycle on…

This article presents a discourse analytic study of how the concept of impartiality is socially constructed by members of the development aid community through an examination of linguistic traits and patterns within (a) inter- and intraorganizational interactions and (b) relevant aid evaluation policy documents. A qualitative analysis of…

Utilizing the framework of educational linguistics, we investigate ways to foster greater awareness of, and facility with, academic English for educators and students across disciplines by maximizing the popularity of language-related software packages, applications and websites, those already commonly found in and out of the classroom. Our work…

This study is anchored on Swale's Theory of Genre Analysis and employed Labov and Waletzky's Personal Experience Narrative (PEN) as a narrative framework in analyzing Vietnamese EFL students' patterns of writing. The study reveals that Vietnamese student's rhetorical structure follows a three-step-pattern which is introducing the character,…

This research investigated on the first language interference in learning the English language among three cultural groups -- the Ilocano, the Ibanag, and the Itawes. The subject of the study were sixty sophomore students from the College of Education and the College of Business Entrepreneurship, and Accountancy who are officially enrolled at…

Monolingual and parallel concordancers have both been found to benefit second-language (L2) grammatical development. However, the relative benefits of these two concordancer types remains unclear. The present study compares learning outcomes and learners' perceptions of a monolingual English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA) and a…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core…

Although there have been many studies comparing native and non-native researchers, few of those studies have been on the use of reporting verbs by Turkish EFL researchers. The purpose of this study is to investigate (1) the most frequently used reporting verbs by native and non-native researchers in ELT and functional and positional differences in…

In this thesis, I focus on scalar implicatures, presuppositions and their connections. In chapter 2, I propose a scalar implicature-based account of neg-raising inferences, standardly analyzed as a presuppositional phenomenon (Gajewski 2005, 2007). I show that an approach based on scalar implicatures can straightforwardly account for the…

Measures of lexical frequency presuppose the existence of corpora, but true machine-readable corpora of sign languages (SLs) are only now being created. Lexical frequency ratings for SLs are needed because there has been a heavy reliance on the interpretation of results of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments in the SL research…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

Teachers in their practice make choices grounded in their teaching experience resulting in what could be labelled design solutions. An identified problem is that these design solutions stay at the level of individual solutions and do not reach the teaching community. The aim of this article is to study how teachers´ design solutions can be…